Showstopper Page 2

  The Merrily Press kept a running countdown of how many weeks remained till we started rehearsals. The first issue, February 2, 1981 announced, “only 30 weeks to go.”

  “And before you know where you are, there you are.”

  Rehearsals finally began in September, 1981 at 890 Studios—sunny, spacious rooms with wide windows, located on lower Broadway. Michael Bennett was rehearsing the first production of Dreamgirls in the same place—I remember eyeing leggy African-American chorus members in the elevator and hubristically thinking to myself, They must be wishing they were in our shoes, in the next Sondheim show. Little did I know they’d be the hit and we would close after sixteen performances.

  Rehearsals, especially after waiting as long as we did for them to start, were a kind of nirvana. Our giddy disbelief never subsided. Every day we harbored the irrational fear that we could wake up and find none of this was actually happening, so our ardor for one another was also born of an anxiety: We might have missed this. We could so easily not have been chosen. Instead, we found ourselves members of The Sondheim Club—exclusive and handpicked. No wonder we constantly affirmed our aren’t-we-close?-ness.

  There were boozy parties thrown by those who had apartments, usually on the Upper West Side or in Hell’s Kitchen—parties where women developed intense crushes on soon-to-be-uncloseted gay men, and there were group lunches at McDonald’s near 890 Studios during rehearsal breaks. We hugged each other a lot and helped each other memorize songs and dance steps.

  We didn’t just adore each other; we adored Hal. Our director became a father figure, though he’d never been known as the cuddly type. He was protective, cheerleading. The whole atmosphere felt familial because it literally was: the first time Hal was directing his only daughter. Daisy behaved like any other member of the cast (she played Frank’s young, third wife, Meg, with a scene and a solo), but everyone sucked up to her anyway. It was lost on no one that she was in the innermost circle. Ultimately her connections were irrelevant because she was one of the strongest singers on the team.

  The other paternal presence was the musical director, Paul Gemignani. Having led the orchestra pits of A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and other Prince/Sondheim triumphs, Paul was known for his low-key wit and quiet authority. He knew how to achieve “what Steve wanted” and people fawned, flirted, and sought his approval. Paul had the girth of a linebacker and the gentleness of a doe. A man of very few words, with just a wink or a wince he could make us laugh or want to bury our heads. He’d sit on a stool in cowboy boots, facing our cast, inscrutable behind his tinted sunglasses and reddish beard. The accordion-bound pages of Sondheim’s stanzas sat on a music stand before him and he pointed firmly at us to cue our entrances.

  We made a mighty sound in unison, but the most impressive voices emerged early on: Liz Callaway—who understudied Mary—was one of those ego-less singers who made us all marvel. Jim Walton’s voice was bright—he started in our ensemble and ultimately replaced the leading man, Jim Weissenbach, as Frank. Lonny Price, who played Charley from the start, had one of my favorite voices: stout despite his boyish frame. Charley was, in many ways, the heartbeat of the show—both in libretto and reality: His Jewishy warmth and sustained intensity anchored Frank and Mary, and all of us.

  Jason Alexander was the other standout, the only Merrily cast member to later become officially famous. (He entered the pantheon of TV history as George Costanza on Seinfeld.) Jason exemplified what Hal and Steve were aiming for: a middle-aged man in a kid’s body. At the age of 21, Jason could be a credible 65, but also a conceivable 18. His voice was also terrific and his comic timing spot-on. (He never had any lines confiscated.)

  Jason played Joe Josephson, the producer who first tells the nascent songwriting team of Shepard and Kringas that they should “write more, work hard—Leave your name with the girl. / Less avante-garde—Leave your name with the girl.” Joe stood in for all the roadblocks Charley and Frank surmounted early in their careers, and presumably Hal and Steve’s too. The show was never explicitly autobiographical, but clearly its creators knew from idealism, striving, and concessions. The fact that Frank ends up writing for Hollywood films instead of the brainier shows that made him and Charley famous in the first place, the fact that he neglected his oldest soulmates, was a cautionary tale for me. Does everyone, I wondered (at the age of sixteen), end up choosing the moneyed path, dumping first spouses and old friends, drowning their sacrifices in bourbon?

  When Sondheim came to rehearsals, he was, not surprisingly, the center of gravity in the room. Which is not to say he was garrulous. On the contrary, he said very little, and then usually to Hal or to Paul. He wasn’t unfriendly in the least, just remote, not a glad-hander. The focus was entirely the work. And no real “friendship” between Steve and the actors was ever likely; we were acolytes, not equals, poised to kiss the hem of his garments. Nevertheless, I ended up feeling connected to Steve; we all did—maybe because we’d been entrusted to introduce his new music. His confidence alone made us feel tethered.

  One time Steve invited the cast to his natty, book-lined townhouse in Murray Hill. It was like getting a glimpse of a master’s lair. I saw the actual sofa where he scribbled lyrics on a legal pad, the piano where he composed, and, most enchanted, his famous room of antique games—a collection that he clearly treasured and that betrayed his sense of play.

  “Some roads are rough …”

  I’m not sure when Merrily moved from promising to plagued. Despite my rosy-colored glasses, I could feel that somehow the play didn’t support the score; Furth’s dialogue lacked the nuance of Sondheim’s lyrics, there were too many characters to keep straight, the pathos wasn’t registering. Rehearsals began to get less jubilant, more sober. As we neared the opening date, things started being replaced: leading man, choreographer, songs, sets, dialogue, costumes. The theater press began to circle like hawks; word was Merrily was in trouble.

  Those of us in the bubble chose to view every change as an upgrade: We hadn’t loved choreographer Ron Field (Cabaret), with his quick temper and gold chains, so we welcomed Larry Fuller, who had brilliantly molded Evita’s Argentinian aristocracy into one snooty blob.

  Similarly, we weren’t fans of our first Frank, Jim Weissenbach (who happened to be the son of Hal’s college roommate), because he was aloof offstage and awkward on. His substitute, Jim Walton, was one of the kindest, most handsome members of our ensemble. (And good looks weren’t a given in our motley crew.)

  The costume overhaul (costly wardrobes which were summarily scrapped) was a major forfeiture for me. One minute I had ten glorious outfits with sequins and feathers, the next minute I had a T-shirt with one word on it: “His Assistant.” Our new T-shirts announced our relationships to each other onstage—a sure sign that the play had been confusing people. (Admittedly, it was a kick when Merrily groupies at the stage door showed up in sweatshirts reading, “The Audience.”) I said goodbye to lavish ensembles which were conceived to flag the era of the moment: bell-bottom pants, strappy silver heels, and innovations such as the “Dead Body Stole”—a camouflage-fabric evening wrap in the shape of a Vietnam casualty.

  The other renovations blur in my memory—I don’t recall the chronology, but individual moments are clear:

  The afternoon Hal lost his cool over the clunky stadium seats in Eugene Lee’s set.

  The rehearsal when Sondheim introduced Charley’s new song, which he and Lonny had rehearsed alone: “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” (The song would become a regular showstopper.)

  The day when Sally Klein (playing Beth, Frank’s first wife) lost the song that would become Merrily’s signature—“Not a Day Goes By”—to Frank Shepard because she sang it feebly and Jim Walton sang it better. (Carly Simon later recorded it.)

  The eleventh hour when a stranger—an actual bona fide adult (sacrilege)– was added to the cast to portray a senior Frank delivering a commencement speech.

  The slow drip of watching my part, Evelyn, being whittle
d away.

  “How can you get so far off the track?”

  In hindsight, it’s hard to believe we remained entirely optimistic, but we did. These guys were too big to fail.

  We were happily ensconced in the Alvin Theatre on West 52nd Street, where Annie had played four years earlier. My dressing-room mirror was alongside Tonya Pinkins’ and Donna Marie Elio’s (now Asbury)– two of my greatest pals in the troupe.

  The first preview, October 8, 1981, was charged; Merrily’s overture is one of the most rousing and gorgeous ever written, and we were all trembling backstage as we listened to it, poised in our red graduation robes. (There was a lot of playful groping under those things.)

  But as the evening evolved, seats began to empty.

  By the second act, we were singing to people’s backs walking up the aisles to the exits.

  Previews got extended.

  My father used to pick me up at the stage door. Often he would stand in the wings, watching us sing the penultimate number: “Our Time.” We were all positioned on the scaffolding set, looking out at the starry sky, vowing to be “the names in tomorrow’s papers.”

  There were fifty-two preview performances until the moment of truth: opening night, November 16.

  “When does it disappear?”

  The flower deliveries overwhelmed the dressing rooms and our mirrors became obscured by telegrams and notes. Hal wrote genial congratulations to every one of us, and Steve’s accompanying card simply said, “Ditto.”

  The audience actually stayed in its seats and stood cheering for our curtain call.

  I remember getting dressed for the big after-party, and cannot fathom why I thought it was stylish to don a black-ribbon choker with a rhinestone star at the neck. The pictures of me in the limousine (rented generously by Mom and Dad) are cringe-inducing. My black velvet dress was from Macy’s and my heels were lower than they should have been. But I felt high as we drove the short distance to the Plaza Hotel with my family.

  Hours later, the New York Times’ review dealt a death blow—from a critic who is arguably Sondheim’s greatest critical champion. The first line of Frank Rich’s appraisal read as follows: “As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He continued, “What’s really being wasted here is Sondheim’s talent” and declared our cast “dead wood.”

  The other notices weren’t much better.

  When we all gathered backstage before the next performance, Hal reassured us that it wasn’t over.

  But it was.

  We closed twelve days after we opened, singing “Our Time” from our platform perches, tears strangling our voices and smudging our makeup.

  “It’s our time, / Breathe it in: / Worlds to change and worlds to win. / Our time, coming through. / Me and you, kid, me and you.”

  We couldn’t self-medicate afterward (was I even drinking alcohol yet?) because we had to get up the next morning at dawn to record the cast album for RCA Victor.

  It was another pinch-me experience—standing with earphones on our heads, microphones at our mouths, Sondheim behind a glass booth, conferring with producer Thomas Z. Shepard and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick. Paul Gemignani was our steady skipper, with his usual baton and boots, revving the orchestra and whispering with Steve.

  It was a long, mournful day, but it gave us all an incomparable sendoff.

  The last song we recorded was “Our Time.”

  “Years from now, we’ll remember and we’ll come back, / Buy the rooftop and hang a plaque: / This is where we began / Being what we can.” As Jason Alexander later told a reporter, “We were a mess.”

  “Yesterday is done”

  I wasn’t the saddest person in the lot and I’ve ruminated often about why. Maybe because I’d never really believed it could last: The gift was too good to be true from the start, so the brief time we got felt like a windfall. Also, I wasn’t at the point where I’d affirmatively chosen a career in the theater. Merrily was a blessing when it landed but it wasn’t my livelihood; at sixteen, I didn’t need a paycheck yet, nor had I expected to reach a pinnacle before paying my dues. For others, there was more at stake—financially and professionally. They were back to the starting gate.

  “Pick yourself a road …”

  It’s easy to be convinced that a balloon as buoyant as Merrily stays afloat. But, if I may milk the metaphor, I discovered it can burst in an instant—even careen, irretrievably, out of view.

  After it was over, it was just over. No one said, “Wait—come back to the Alvin stage, there’s been a huge mistake.” There was no patron saint to rescue us. We packed up our dressing rooms and hugged the nice guy at the stage door.

  I returned to my eleventh-grade classrooms and felt even a little relieved to be back to the old routine of exams, sleepovers, and modest school plays.

  We continued to have Merrily reunions and picnics (called “Merrily We Eat Along” by the Merrily Press), but even they tapered off.

  In the spring of 1983, eighteen months after being on Broadway, Daisy and I worked together again—in the school basement: I directed her in The Fantasticks! for my senior project. She was a shining Luisa, though still a reluctant lead; I had to nudge Daisy onstage. We were back to our old rhythm.

  When I was admitted to college two years later, a surreal moment came when I walked nervously into my first “big” musical tryout—for the Yale Dramat’s production of Fiddler on the Roof—and the musical director, Scott Frankel (who, years later, composed the remarkable Grey Gardens on Broadway,) surprised me by plunking the five chords that precede the line “Yesterday is done …” from Merrily.

  How did he know? I wondered.

  After college, I enrolled in earnest acting classes and braved the Actors’ Equity union lines at dawn to get into open calls. (How many buttered bialys did I eat out of tin foil, loitering in the 6 a.m. darkness on West 46th Street?) I scored a few C-level parts—Vivie in Mrs. Warren’s Profession on Long Island, and the only non-lesbian role in a Djuna Barnes play in SoHo. But my heart wasn’t where it needed to be to make a real go of it. “You’re auditioning on your knees,” said my acting coach, Gene Lasko. “It’s like you think you’ve failed before you’ve tried.”

  He was right. Now that I’d arrived at the age where “getting a part” really counted—for rent and groceries—now that it was the only thing requiring my energy, no longer a matter of juggling multiple deadlines and diversions, the color drained from the career. It wasn’t enough and it was also too much: too much pressure, too much rejection, too much out of my control.

  There’s no question that Merrily hovered as an admonitory signpost: You have seen your idols trip. This show-business territory will never be safe or assured … Remember what you’ve seen.

  “Rolling along …”

  I became a journalist and never looked back. In fact, I was aware of dodging a bullet: I was a type-A approval addict who needed to score goals at regular intervals, not just keep kicking and kicking. I worked for Fred Friendly, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers at PBS, then at 60 Minutes for Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. After having kids, I switched to print reporting and wrote for magazines and newspapers, eventually publishing two books with Doubleday. For my first book, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish, I interviewed sixty-two public figures about their Jewish identity—or lack of it. The “stars” included Dustin Hoffman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mike Nichols, Larry King, and, in a nice resolution of sorts, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim.

  It’s curious how, as life unfolds, a major chapter gets edited out. My Merrily moment became just a footnote, relegated to albums and a few inebriated stories. I remember joking in college that I’d likely one day be a doddering old lady telling my grandchildren, “Your grandma was once on Broadway!” And that’s exactly what will come to pass if my two kids, Benjamin, 14, and Molly, 11, bless me with descendants.

  When my kids were little, I took t
hem to shows whenever possible and, naturally, I’d recounted the Merrily fairytale to my husband, but he and our children had never seen me perform—other than the requisite birthday toasts (which I spend way too much time conceiving).

  That is, until 2002, when I received an e-mail from Lonny Price, asking me to rejoin the original Merrily cast for a special reunion: a one-night-only concert version at LaGuardia High School to benefit Musical Theater Works, which offers topnotch training to New York kids.

  At first, I didn’t take the project too seriously. It sounded like a quaint idea, all of us in the same room again, holding the music in three-ring binders and doing our yeoman’s best to reconstruct our roles, despite years of dereliction. But the production turned out to be a major undertaking, rehearsed over four intensive days of rehearsals, complete with new choreography and direction from Kathleen Marshall (who would go on to fame directing The Pajama Game and more recently, Anything Goes), emceed by our celebrity alumnus, Jason Alexander, and inspected by Sondheim himself.

  When I arrived at the first rehearsal, the scene was more poignant than I ever expected. Despite everyone’s creases, paunches, and gray hairs (and Daisy’s pregnant belly), our youthful affection was energizing. My lackadaisical attitude did an about-face and I dove into rehearsals as if I was auditioning all over again.

  It was a demanding hoot. For four days, we memorized, sweated, and sung, reminisced hungrily, caught up on two elapsed decades: careers, divorces, baby pictures. The only deadly-serious moment was when Sondheim showed up to watch a run-through. He sat just a few rows from the stage with his characteristic bemused grin, and an occasional devastating frown. I’ll never forget the Sondheim Chill when, after one song, I watched him approach the unassuming Jim Walton and say firmly, “Just sing it the way I wrote it.”